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Even a cursory search will show this.
You're simply ignorant on this matter.
Regardless of how somebody establishes their birth date, that field would still get updated with the data that gets accepted. If that field is invalid, and somebody is receiving payments, then it's wrong.
It's telling that Musk did not publish the data on the age of people that are receiving payments.
Nope. Social security data has a lot of "readers" that need to query the government with a question and get the answer, but do not get the actual data that can give you the answer.
None of those organizations are empowered to write back any confirmation they get. For very good reasons, the government does not let random consumers overwrite social security data. The system is instead designed to be tolerant of bad data and encourage lower level groups to merely check for eligibility.
A concrete example: In our state's insurance marketplace, if your name on the application does not match your name in the Social Security database, it gets flagged. You then provide the state documentation that proves you are the person with the name on the application. That clears the issue and allows you to get your health insurance benefits, but does NOT update the row in the social security database! Doing so would require allowing a downstream, el-cheapo third party contractor application to randomly overwrite whatever it wants in the literally national database. That's a stupid idea. This isn't Google, where randomly shutting off accounts on mistakes is fine. When the government does that, we are supposed to tell them not to do that.
What has followed is people coming out of the woodwork to explain how this may have been reflected in the system since the system was written in COBOL and the reasons why those people were reflected that way the system, that they likely weren't actually having those payments made and it there wasn't the wastage of tax payers money as Elon claims.
Whereby citizens that don't have a recorded age are represented with an age of 0 and COBOL backdates their age from 1875.
It seems to be Elon's DOGE team having access to data that they have little experience in reviewing and understanding and are spreading claims that are false.
Google it.
There’s zero evidence these “people coming out of the woodwork” have any idea what they are actually talking about. No evidence they have ever worked for SSA or have any insider info on how its systems work. It appears these “people coming out of the woodwork” are just random nobodies speculating in public (likely incorrectly), and people are repeating their speculation because they like how it sounds and they don’t know enough about the topic to realise that it probably isn’t true
And who says they actually were being paid, was that just assumed or did they find that people were inappropriately being paid? It is been circulated that there is an automated component that prevents that from happening if people are aged past 115 years old
https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0202602578
It is irresponsible to stand up in front of the Whitehouse and spew that there are people receiving social security payments that are 150 years old, without performing a formal inquiry into the matter or communicating the detail appropriately.
Yes, but this is the whole aspect that is misinformation: there is no evidence that (alleged) “150 year old social security recipients” has anything to do with COBOL. That appears to be simply some speculative and likely incorrect theory that some random cooked up, and people that don’t know any better are repeating as fact
It is entirely possible that Musk/DOGE’s claims about this topic will turn out to be incorrect - but if they do, then I very much doubt that the actual reason, whatever it may turn out to be, will be due to any feature of the COBOL language (or the implementation of it SSA is using)
But Elon made a great headline for himself without any nuanced or substantiated view.
Furthermore, while I wouldn’t be surprised if Musk’s claims turn out to be a exaggeration or distortion, they are an exaggeration or distortion of genuine internal government info - being weighed against uninformed speculation by Internet randoms
Scenario: Chief executive president says that children are raped by unicorns. People react by saying, there is no way, unicorns don't exist. How do you know they don't exist? There are no animals with a unicorn-looking long twisted horn on their foreheads, some people respond. Somebody else points out that Narwhals exist and somehow we've reached the conclusion that people astonished with the president in chief are somehow just people with musk derangement syndrome and talking from their asses.
In the meantime the extraordinary claim that started all this goes unaddressed and we're ready to repeat the cycle with the next inflammatory bait that takes no time to produce and drains all the energy of all those who want to make sense of it.
There is supposedly an automated process to remove social security payments from people over the age of 115, unless there is an exception.
The only reason you have to believe that Musk's statements are not correct is the aforementioned inaccurate assertion about COBOL.
This is precisely why business and government are different entities. Business is a wealth-creating opportunity with less responsibility. Government may not be low-latency, but its aim is to be responsible and correct. Confusing the two is a major problem.
Something being useful to Musk and his goons doesn't make it "useful" without such qualifiers.
> The only reason you have to believe that Musk's statements are not correct is the aforementioned inaccurate assertion about COBOL.
Hardly. That's just saying how little attention you paid to the man.
The evidence is a query run on the data. No insiders have disputed the results.
>Hardly. That's just saying how little attention you paid to the man.
Convincing evidence filled rebuttal from an internet rando. What @fastball said is based on readily available fact.
And his well documented history of spouting bullshit and flim-flam.
> Beneficiaries with other claimants active on the record;
> Dually or technically entitled beneficiaries with a discrepancy among records (information pertaining to date of birth (DOB), suspension, and termination; or
> Beneficiaries in an active pay status on a dually entitled record.
What we don't know, is how many >115 records get pushed to manual processing, and how efficient that processing is. Is there a backlog? How big is it?
It mentions that one thing that can prevent the automated process, is when they have multiple records for a person, and they have conflicting dates of birth – and then they have to follow some process to resolve the discrepancy. What happens if they get stuck and can't work out which date of birth is the right one?
It also mentions how in some cases they need proof of death to carry out the manual termination. What if their attempts to procure such proof are unsuccessful?
Speculation: maybe there are a cohort of individuals who are long deceased, but they fall into one of the exceptions to the automated termination at 115 process, SSA is missing proof of death, and if nobody is actually "cashing the checks", it might be administratively easier to just keep on "paying" them by printing the checks and then burying them at the back of a filing cabinet than to cancel their social security. Maybe that's who these "150 year old social security recipients" are. So nobody would actually be committing fraud, and the government isn't really losing any money (since the checks are never cashed). Not exactly good, but maybe not quite as bad as Musk et al make it sound either. And quite likely it is just a small handful of people who are a rounding error in the federal budget.
You gave a several good explanations about why the current automated processes don't mark the records as deceased. But those are excuses. Just because the design of the system is flawed, that doesn't mean the system isn't in error because the code implements the design.
All those sound like it needs to be fixed to me. As somebody that deals with data for large enterprises that are nowhere near, obviously, as the government, but definitely companies with 100k employees and several in the Fortune 20. It's rudimentary to: - have a data staging area before data gets into any financial system intended for payment transactions. Those staging systems can be used for analytical, reporting, and especially data cleaning. - No use one record to represent the obligations to a completely different records of the same type. i.e. overloaded corrupt master data.
Uncurated data systems should be treated completely differently than systems that actually impacts financial transactions. Just because it's taxpayer money, they shouldn't be able to avoid criticism because they're wasting the money. If anything they should be more accountable.
[0] see e.g. https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
If the source-of-truth for SS payments is the database and associated COBOL system, and that system reports payments being made to 150 year olds, that is bad. We should not be doing that. It doesn't matter if the birth date was deliberately added as 1875 or if the COBOL system replaces null date values with 1875 (which does not seem to be the case if you read the linked thread).